Relating some stuff to other stuff

Traceability in food and medicine supply chains has to handle stuffs—entities such as milk and starch indicated with mass nouns—and their portions and parts that get separated and put together to make the final product. Implementations have underspecified ‘links’, if at all, and theoretical accounts from philosophy and in domain ontologies are incomplete as regards the relations involved. To solve this issue, we define seven relations for portions and stuff-parts, which are temporal where needed. The resulting theory distinguishes between the extensional and intensional level, and between amount of stuff and quantity. With application trade-offs, this has been implemented as an extension to the Stuff Ontology core ontology that now also imports a special purpose module of the Ontology of units of Measure for quantities. Although atemporal, some automated reasoning for traceability is still possible thanks to using property chains to approximate the relevant temporal aspects

Definitions and Semantic Simulations Based on Object-Oriented Analysis and Modeling

We have proposed going beyond traditional ontologies to use rich semantics implemented in programming languages for modeling. In this paper, we discuss the application of executable semantic models to two examples, first a structured definition of a waterfall and second the cardiopulmonary system. We examine the components of these models and the way those components interact. Ultimately, such models should provide the basis for direct representation

A note on the compatibility of part-whole relations with foundational ontologies

Parthood in mereology is one relation, and typically is included in foundational ontologies. Some of these foundational ontologies and many domain ontologies use a plethora of parthood and part-whole relations, such as `sub process' and `portion'. This poses requirements on the foundational ontologies and, perhaps, Ontology, on what to do with these two different approaches to part-whole relations. We present an analysis of DOLCE, BFO, GFO, SUMO, GIST, and YAMATO on their inclusion and use of part-whole relations. It demonstrates there is no perfect fit with either for various reasons. We then aim to bridge this gap with an orchestration of ontologies of part-whole relations that are aligned to several foundational ontologies and such that they can be imported into other ontologies

On the ontology of part-whole relations in Zulu language and culture

Parthood and attendant part-whole relations enjoy interest in ontology authoring for various subject domains, as well as in, e.g., NLP to understand text. The list of common part-whole relations is occasionally slightly modified for languages other than English. For isiZulu, it was shown that there are not always 1:1 mappings and, moreover, dictionaries list many more translations for parthood and part-whole relations. This complicates selecting the semantically appropriate ones for localising ontologies or aligning local ontologies to other ones. It also raises the question whether the ‘common’ part-whole relations are really that common. We aim to investigate the extant part-whole relations in isiZulu and determine their ontological status.We harvested a lexicon of 81 terms from dictionaries, which was reduced to 31 through several iterations of refinement, of which 13 were formalised and aligned to well-known part-whole relations. It showed that in some cases distinctions are made—and for which words exist—that have not been included before in part-whole relations, yet in other cases it is more coarse-grained; e.g., a parthood for portions of cloth, for objects properly contained in the mouth, and for regions with a part-region that has a fiat boundary and objects located in it

An analysis of commitments in ontology language design

Multiple ontology languages have been developed over the years, which brings afore two key components: how to select the appropriate language for the task at hand and language design itself. This engineering step entails examining the ontological ‘commitments’ embedded into the language, which, in turn, demands for an insight into what the effects of philosophical viewpoints may be on the design of a representation language. But what are the sort of commitments one should be able to choose from that have an underlying philosophical point of view, and which philosophical stances have a knock-on effect on the specification or selection of an ontology language? In this paper, we provide a first step towards answering these questions. We identify and analyse ontological commitments embedded in logics, or that could be, and show that they have been taken in well-known ontology languages. This contributes to reflecting on the language as enabler or inhibitor to formally characterising an ontology or an ontological investigation, as well as the design of new ontology languages following the proposed design process

Evidence-based lean logic profiles for conceptual data modelling languages

Multiple logic-based reconstruction of conceptual data modelling languages such as EER, UML Class Diagrams, and ORM exists. They mainly cover various fragments of the languages and none are formalised such that the logic applies simultaneously for all three modelling language families as unifying mechanism. This hampers interchangeability, interoperability, and tooling support. In addition, due to the lack of a systematic design process of the logic used for the formalisation, hidden choices permeate the formalisations that have rendered them incompatible. We aim to address these problems, first, by structuring the logic design process in a methodological way. We generalise and extend the DSL design process to apply to logic language design more generally and, in particular, by incorporating an ontological analysis of language features in the process. Second, availing of this extended process, of evidence gathered of language feature usage, and of computational complexity insights from Description Logics (DL), we specify logic profiles taking into account the ontological commitments embedded in the languages. The profiles characterise the minimum logic structure needed to handle the semantics of conceptual models, enabling the development of interoperability tools. There is no known DL language that matches exactly the features of those profiles and the common core is small (in the tractable ALNI). Although hardly any inconsistencies can be derived with the profiles, it is promising for scalable runtime use of conceptual data models